Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Moving existing software raid to different windows 2003 machine



On a windows 2003 server with 2 x 750 GB raid for data (using the builtin windows 2003 software raid with dynamic disks), the main board broke. (The system and the whole c:\ with c:\windows, c:\programs and c:\documents and settings was on a separete disk and all this is no longer important, only the data raid is what I need.)



Now I want to take the 2 x 750 gb disks and add them to a different windows 2003 server as software raid.



But how do I do this and keep the raid intact?



I can imagine I could add one disk (and as the 2 disks are identical copies) just erase the second disk and add it again and windows will build a new raid system like I had before. With all the data on it hopefully.




But of course during the copying process there is a certain risk, because at this time the data is only present on the first disc, until it is finished.



So how do I get this right and keep the raid intact during the whole process?



EDIT: I just added the 2 drives to a different system like suggested.



what happened is that windows recognized the raid and treated it as such from the beginning and all my data was there. BUT: it started "resyncing" of the 2 drives, which takes many hours showing me the progress (97% now). Doesn't this mean that until the sync is finished I do not have redundancy. What if the master drive fails during sync at 50%
?




EDIT 2: The resync has finished now and the drive is marked as "error free". But because I do not know if I had redundncy at all times during the process this is actually just what I not wanted. Can someone add some informtion?


Answer



With Windows created software RAID that is a non-boot volume, you can just plug both disks in, boot up and then import the volume through Disk Management. It should be very straightforward - no trickery needed.


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